Chill vestal!
by Evelyn Blake
Summary: Mark Delange Greaves, nee Grishenko, goes West to change his life - not for the first time. A very silly story only slenderly connected with Emily's Quest.


_"__Now she was one of those infinitely distant stars which you still see because a few centuries ago they sent out their light on its path, and it keeps on travelling and reaching our globe, although the star that sent it has perhaps long since been extinguished_."

-F.P. Grove, A Search for America

MARK DELANGE GREAVES, _nee _Grishenko, removed the false monocle from his wounded left eye and massaged the sharp edges of his face as though he could smooth them. Through the red and gold curtains of his train compartment window the changing shadows of Ontario's thin trees brushed back and forth over his dun suit and heavy skin, and he assumed a placid, mildly stunted expression, one he hoped would render him, if not inconspicuous, at least not wholly out of place in this train, among these stern and clouded people. These people! His mind wandered to the slender child-woman he had left three days before, and her aunt - clear and cold, and stern as gray stones, mirroring each other's faces in that wonderful shabby farmhouse parlor. There was moonlight there and merciless earth. And she had refused him! They were so terribly pure in Canada, he thought. Making icy virtue of their loneliness. He fumbled for his notebook – a dull stump of pencil - _icy virtue loneliness. Chill vestal. ocean/prairie? _He wrote the word _snow _and underlined it four times. But there was the letter from his wife he had not opened - yes. What was _that woman _after now? He unfolded the letter. _Cher __Misha_, it began.

He closed his eyes. Though he had made a point of giving up the habit of lofty sighs when he signed the contract to teach in the prairie town - Dunne's Creek? Deankirk? Some stark name comprised of blunt surname and object – Greaves felt his lungs expanding and resigned himself to exhale. All he had said to the girl in the farmhouse now seemed not merely ridiculous, but indiscreet. He realized, rubbing the deep cliffs of bone around his eyes, that it must also have sounded insincere. Must have _been, _in fact – for what self had Mark D. Greaves to offer any woman?

That was the problem he proposed to solve.

I_ can't imagine why my letters haven't arrived. Is that dreadful old critic you've been slumming with trying to keep us apart for some reason? I really fear he is some sort of sex maniac. _Do_ be on your guard for once, __Misha. _

The bat-like eyebrows sank. His estranged wife never acknowledged that she _was _estranged, though he had been ignoring her letters for the past ten years - only repeating one helpful hint after another about how to prevent his replies from getting lost in the mail. To ignore her was useless. Simply to _say, _"Frede, do not write to me," was actually counter-productive, as it encouraged her to imagine that he was suffering paroxysm of passion for her – for why else would he deprive himself of her chatter? What demon of confidence was that? he wondered. The same strange self-regard or abnegation that brought her forward on the Theatre Druga stage every night to recite her pockmarked new lover's so-called poetry, which, if Greaves had heard it aright, was created by cutting up old Bulwer-Lytton novels and pasting the shards to her abundant flesh with honey and molasses. He reflected a little sadly that he had lost the ability to tell when she was exaggerating for effect.

_What's this I hear of you teaching school in Saskatchewan? If you're trying to impress me with your desolation, it's not working, cher. You must quit that awful country before you lose your wits entirely or a bear eats you, or both. _

He smiled bitterly. If she only knew! Greaves intended to be eaten. Though he had signed the contract to teach a week prior, in Halifax, it was the girl, he decided now, whose example had convinced him to cease play-acting and learn to live. Now, reviewing his talk with the superintendent, he began to be convinced that his disappointment in the remote town was for show. That in fact, he had been given Dead Brook, or whatever the place was called, precisely because it was hard and far and without comfort. He was giving himself to the land to be swallowed. It was the only way to be a real writer – far from the hothouses of the cities, bereft of the comforts of homelessness.

_Honestly, I think those potboilers of yours are corroding your critical faculties. Why don't you come back to New York where you belong? It is so foolish to deny who you are, when we have come so far to be truly ourselves. Whatever you think of "my" friends, they have at least the _capacity _to appreciate your work. I can even find you a nice model if you're that out of sorts. Send reply c/o Stanislaus this time, in New Bedford; it's the best way to be sure of reaching me. Bises, Federica. _

Greaves turned the letter over to see if there was any more. There was nothing. As always, he felt the old wave of sadness rolling over him, a wave that began in St. Petersburg and washed blackly over Berlin, Paris, New York. He saw himself rolling his big good eye at her poetry while his own won toasts and plaudits, saw her bony animated face fall as he flaunted his mistresses in the Cafe Thanatos, felt as though it were new the smolder of resentment when the flighty editor of _New Muse _picked up her "Corporeal Fluids" series to run across the drawings by Picasso, and how he had denounced them anonymously in the _Cormorant 6_, only to be found out – only to have never been hidden in the first place, his style as loud a beacon as his outlandish face.

Mikhail Dmitrievich Grishenko had done that. But that insufferable person was now dead, buried somewhere in the wild Atlantic. Mark Greaves had done her no harm. Mark Delange Greaves, his accent masked by theatrically rolling vowels, was merely an honest hack with a yen for an old-fashioned romance, an earnest struggling writer with the promise of greatness in his stride – yes, and a Canadian born and bred. At least, he would be. These people would be his people. He touched his fingers to the dirty glass of the train window.

He could almost imagine his childhood in one of those towns: little Mark Greaves scrawling English words on the white floor of the farmhouse under the ugly crayons of grim ancestors, the French mother wringing her white hands over a crude stove, the Scottish father storming the floorboards in anguish over credit. His eyes welled up with tears for these his imagined parents, and for the boy who in his loneliness dreamed a mock Europe, a Europe he pretended to have come from. No more. He was Mark Greaves now – and if _that woman _would only stop making a nuisance of herself, there would be no one left on earth to say he had not been Mark Greaves all along.

It's foolish to deny who you are, Frede had said. But Frede was wrong; she had been wrong about everything. Wrong about why they left and wrong about where they were headed. He turned, now reflexively, toward the window, but it was as smeared and blackened as ever. Outside, if he could only see it, were the hills yielding to prairies, the rivers and the grasses and the sky. They would teach him all he had missed in the childish fantasies that had been his life. He would root himself and grow again from that black unceasing land, and when he returned East, he would be real at last, no wanderer orphan but a man _of _someplace. Then, perhaps, he would find the girl from the farmhouse. Then he would rewrite his happy ending.


End file.
